Packing Heat
by Rachel C. Astrid
Summary: Castle discovers a juicy secret of Kate's. While he grapples with new complexities in his feelings for her, Beckett comes to terms with her sexual attraction to Castle. Set during 2x17 "Tick, Tick, Tick" between the red wine and the infamous pancakes. #2 in the Writer!Kate series but stands alone (1st one written).
1. Exposed

**Part One: Exposed**

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><p>Wine glass in-hand, Richard Castle settled into the sofa, stuffed a pillow behind him, and kicked up his feet. His partner's rather foreboding farewell loomed behind in her absence like a waft of tangy perfume, but he let it roll off of him. His intentions for staying the night in her living room were strictly protective.<p>

From his vantage point on her sofa, Castle could stare down the front door, where she had just recently pre-empted his knock and scared the bejeezus out of him by pointing a gun at him. _Way to greet your night guard, Beckett._ She'd stood down upon recognizing him, and he'd held out the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape as a peace offering and essentially invited himself inside.

Shame that she hadn't lingered to finish her wine. He'd freely poured it into his own glass before she'd even left the room.

Now he swished it around, glanced dutifully at the large windows over the kitchen area to his far right, and let his gaze sweep around the apartment. He repeated this inspection a number of times, finished a few glasses of wine, and began to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Well-tested tolerance level be damned, perhaps alcohol was not the wisest choice of beverage for a sworn guard on duty.

He set down his glass and stood, hoping that a perimeter check might rouse him.

He declared the living room safe, wandered to the bathroom which he declared safe and then utilized, and returned to clear the kitchen and living area once more. Finally, he stood a short distance from Beckett's bedroom door, content that it was quiet inside her room and unwilling to risk either startling her or making her doubt his agenda.

He turned and considered the wine, still deciding whether he would attempt to sleep or keep a wakeful post through the night.

Suddenly distracted by the bookcase near the entryway, he strode over to it, as though to observe the intricacies of a work of art at the MoMA or the Met.

So this was the library of Katherine Beckett.

He fingered the bindings, feeling a charge of energy in the pit of his stomach as he imagined Beckett holding these same books; clutching them to her heart; sinking into her bed with them; running her eyes over their pages, line by line and word by word.

He had just worked himself back down from the natural thought progression when he settled on a title that intrigued him, a hardbound novel from none other than one of his old poker buddies. But when he slid it off the shelf, a slender book wedged beside it slipped out, bumped the picture frame on the wooden bureau, and fell to the floor with barely more than the sound of rustling pages.

He stooped for it, all the while looking over his shoulder as though certain that the disturbance in the fixed environment (if not the noise) would have Beckett armed and at an open bedroom door by now, but she didn't emerge.

He straightened, still holding the novel, but turning the mysterious tagalong over in his hands for inspection. It was a notebook, a fairly cheap one that screamed, "_Mine me for scrap paper!_" more than it might have screamed, "_Private Property: Trespassers will be shot_," so he didn't actually give it much thought before opening it.

At least, he liked to think later on that he had no reason to suspect that it was anything personal. It was stuffed onto this shelf, after all, and it wasn't like it looked much like a diary or a scrapbook.

That was because it was neither.

At first, it was fragments of Beckett's handwriting. Lots of phrases grouped in haphazard word clouds, some strewn about and isolated like raindrops and puddles. Wordplay, imagery, metaphors and similes, funny little idioms, locations, and proper names—they were simply verbal sketches of silhouettes without further content or context, just waiting to be illuminated and connected.

Eventually the pages of fragments turned to wildly edited lines of poetry._Lyrics,_ Castle realized, deciphering the notations for musical chords on some of them. He smiled to himself at the thought of sexy Kate Beckett slinging a guitar strap over her shoulder or plucking at the stringed instrument on her lap; of her loosening up enough to sing aloud; of him winding her up good and tight before loosening her right back up enough to make her sing.

He felt the blood rush from his head and knew he needed to cool it. Since a cold shower was not currently a viable option—and since the fleeting thought of using Beckett's bathtub was inherently counter-productive—he resolved to sit back on the sofa and stare down the door again.

He didn't make it.

Absentmindedly, he'd opened the notebook a number of pages ahead. The words leapt out to him, and as he breathed them in, they clung heavily to his insides.

_As though accentuating the fact that they were entirely alone, Detective Heat kicked the door closed behind her with the heel of her boot, never breaking their eye contact._

It could have gone either way, but something told Castle that this line did not describe an investigative interview. His Sexy-Sense was tingling, and it wasn't the only one.

The words came at him faster and faster until he was barely making sense of the full sentences. Phrases like "bra straps" and "clasp," "belt" and "waistband" managed to make his rugged face flush with heat. His more constricted extremities became sore with anticipation. A few suggestive adjectives decidedly _not_ limited to subtle innuendo only worsened his condition.

He was drawn back to the moment he knew that he would write about Nikki Heat—except that he hadn't known the character's name just yet. At that point, it was just about Beckett. She fascinated him. She excited him—and not just in "that" way. She played hard-to-get, but she also played along.

To celebrate closing their first case, he'd suggested dinner and, ahem, collaborative debriefing.

With a wry smile, she'd asked, "Why, Castle? So I can be another one of your conquests?" He'd loved the way she'd punctuated her sentence by raising her brows; wondered whether she did it on purpose or if her twitches were involuntary.

"Or I could be one of yours." He could tell that he had surprised her with that one.

She had rebounded and politely taken his hand, a signal of the end of the conversation without the promise of another. "It was nice to meet you, Mr. Castle."

He'd let the hint of a smolder grace his features, an expression he'd practiced plenty of times before. "Too bad," he'd lamented earnestly. "It would have been great."

Biting her lower lip—whether to censor herself or to taunt him, he couldn't be sure—she'd leaned in close, her breath warm at his ear: "You have no idea."

But Beckett herself certainly seemed to have had some idea. Apparently, Beckett had lots of ideas—and she had actually put pen to paper about them. He never would have guessed. He was usually too busy noticing her and needling her to consider, really consider, that he might not be the only one to experience their banter as verbal foreplay.

Of course, Jordan Shaw—_the _Jordan Shaw—had suspected more of them than that. "So," she'd asked Beckett, "if you're not sleeping together, why do you keep him around?"

All right, so it wasn't the most flattering way she could have said it.

Having quashed the romantic accusation, Beckett nonchalantly defended his helpfulness. And the fact that Shaw sensed something at all gave Castle hope. She was rarely wrong about her profiling. Perhaps in this case, her clairvoyance simply meant seeing a vision of their future.

Or perhaps she'd gotten a hold of Kate Beckett's writings. Yowza, this stuff was not so discreetly coded.

_Rook was caught up in her proximity and her scent. "You smell like cherries," he said._

Where had he heard _that _before? Trust the cop to write what she knew, even in a fantasy.

_Not a fantasy,_ Castle corrected himself. _Just fiction. _Some part of him maintained the distinction.

Inevitably, and irreparably, Castle thought about page 105 of _Heat Wave_and, more to the point, page 106, when Nikki told Rook that she kept protection in the nightstand. Rook replied that she wouldn't need a gun; he'd be "a perfect gentleman," but Nikki insisted, "You'd better not" before she mauled him. He'd written it that way; it was the closest he dared to come to narrating his dreams.

_Protection._ Castle was here for her protection. _Oh, damn the double entendres._


	2. Unspoken

A/N: By the way, special thanks to **lv2bnsb1** who reviewed my previous story, "Rock, Paper, Scissors." I had started this one, and your comment inspired an important aspect of it and helped the pieces fall into place. So thank you! This chapter is dedicated to you.

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><p><strong>Part Two: Unspoken<strong>

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><p>After Kate Beckett returned from her hygienic evening ritual, changed into her pajamas, turned out the light, and attempted fruitlessly to fall asleep, she shoved a hand up out of the sheets to find one of the books that she kept on the nightstand.<p>

The disrupted stack lightly bumped the table lamp—which she probably should have turned on first, upon reconsideration—and a couple of books fell to the floor with the satisfying thud of literary hard-covers.

She half-expected Castle to come barreling through the door at the noise, but alas, he didn't.

_Not "alas." _She'd told him not to come in. She'd meant it—really, she had. Not alas.

She stayed still for a moment in case he'd been delayed, hunting for a weapon or something. She gave him thirty seconds because that was about how long it should've taken him to think of the wine bottle—he'd probably emptied it already—and cross the apartment.

Still nothing. Either he'd drunken himself to sleep, or he never heard the noise. Neither instilled in her much confidence in her night watchman, but then she had already sent home Montgomery's security detail, so even a tipsy Castle was more protection than she'd expected. It was like having a lazy, loyal dog snoozing at the front door; except Castle would shed less.

Or maybe he _did_ hear the drop, but had a keen enough ear to discern that there was no threat to her life? She smiled at the thought of Castle moonlighting as a clever secret agent, though she'd never give him the satisfaction. She'd never fully acknowledge the implications of this image in her own mind, either.

Kate Beckett kept a lot of secrets to herself. She kept a lot of secrets from herself, too.

Some secrets were sillier than others, but some of the silliest were among the most guarded. For instance, despite her prominent role in inspiring _Heat Wave_—not to mention the fairly safe distance that she maintained from Castle in real life—as a reader, Beckett was about as avid a Nikki Heat/Jameson Rook "shipper" as they came.

She knew that the fandom had concocted a few possible portmanteaux—those cutesy combinations of characters' names—for the literary couple, and while "Nookie" was too coarse for her taste (no matter how badass she knew she was) and "Hook" was too Dustin Hoffman, she found sufficient humor in the term "Rookie." She was a Rookie lover.

And oh, how many ways that sentence could be interpreted and still be true. Though, of course, she would never admit it.

She did not think of all of these things that night. Thinking too often of her secrets—even just those that she consciously hid from the world—risked launching her into dangerous cognitive territory, the corners of her mind that catalogued messy things like emotions and hormones. Organizing that crap was less appealing than tidying the station's unclaimed property room.

But she did think of Nikki Heat, that strange and magnetic creature who was her but also was not her. That fictional representation: reminiscent of its source, yet amorphous, like a reflection in a rippling stream.

She told herself that she couldn't shake Nikki tonight because of this case, because of the mind-games that this serial killer played; not because the other half of Nikki's creative origin was stretched out on the sofa in the next room. Not because she had just forbade him from building theory alone with _another woman_.

But he _should _have known better. That shit was sacred.

Only with Castle was verbal collaboration as rhythmic and possessive as pelvic thrusts.

Though she would never admit it.

And she was good at convincing herself, in not so many words, that her occasional writing spree was no indication of anything she may or may not have felt about Richard Castle or Theory Sex or caffeinated tokens of affection.

Beckett wrote some things from her unofficial partnership with Castle, yes, but only because his words and mannerisms were so _writeable_. She wrote some things from past relationships, too—from her high school beaux right up to Will Sorenson. Any relationship could be mined for character development and, well, other developments. Even as an amateur writer, Beckett knew that.

And she didn't just write sex. She loved layers. She wrote Theory Sex, too. She wrote about enjoying sprinkles. She wrote about the mentor who understood the deepest, darkest places in Nikki's heart better than he knew her bed.

She never completed a full piece—she was no novelist—but she took her writing about as seriously as she took her music. It was cathartic expression, appreciation for art and language. It was hobbyist fiction, not a job and not personal fantasy.

She didn't touch herself when she imagined the scenes that she would eventually write.

Because she'd almost done it when she'd read that steamy scene in _Heat Wave—_the second or the third time, anyway—but as her fingers migrated south, the memory of Castle peeking over the bathroom stall divider haunted her.

Instead of turning her on (not that imagining him ever turned her on), it terrified her that he'd catch on to her. It was bad enough that he'd caught her in the act of reading ahead to the Rookie scene; she didn't need to give him any cause to believe that it had affected her. That his words had affected her.

That she wanted him to write more.

So instead of letting it all steep too long in her mind or working it out on her flesh, lest the mind-reader find out, she poured it into old notebooks.

Plural.

She was on her second one.

In her defense—because, in her experience, guilty people prepared alibis—the first time had been spontaneous. It had sprung up amongst her ideas for poetry and lyrics, and the sudden outpouring of prose only constituted about a third of the notebook's pages. She'd banished it to the bookshelf, as far from her bed as she could get it without throwing it out entirely (not that it _meant _anything to her), but it wasn't long before she'd started afresh.

She still wasn't going to be able to fall asleep, having revved herself up with a non-jealous rant and turned down the Châteauneuf-du-Pape, so instead of retrieving the fallen novels, she leaned across the edge of her bed, turned on the light, and extracted Notebook Number Two from her nightstand drawer.

Beckett flipped through the filled pages with practiced hands and landed on the first blank sheet, not quite halfway through the book. She'd had her copy of _Heat Wave _for all of five months, and, at the rate that she was writing, she could very well have a full sequel before Castle did.

If she could remember the plot.

A college writing professor had once taught her not to censor herself so much when she wrote—that is, not to edit so quickly, not to scratch words out prematurely, because one never knew when a tangent would lead to fertile territory.

Lately, her tangents were, well, fertile.

She sat up against her pillows, notebook in her lap and pen in her hand, and tried to sway Heat and Rook back to the driving force of the story. They were not very cooperative.

_Tonight, like their first night, Nikki did not want him to be such a perfect gentleman. Tonight she wanted the Rook who stormed in and swept her up into his arms. But he seemed to be savoring her, and his movements were deliciously slow._

_Rook traced one finger along the hem of her shirt, and she nipped his lip as a way of telling him to tear it off of her already. She knew that he knew what it meant. Instead, he brushed his thumb against her stomach before sliding up her skin and seeking out her breast. Rick made lazy circles over her bra, and she—_

—was freaking horrified that she'd just written his name.

She almost broke the pen tip, scratching it out like she was obliterating an old flame's initials from the rough bark of a tree.

"Are you jealous?" he'd asked earlier that night.

"I'm not jealous." _If I were jealous, it would mean I thought you were mine._

An image of Rick—uh, _Castle_—discovering the contents of this journal flashed across her mind, like he was peeking over the bathroom stall divider again.

Except she'd known that time that she was doing something just a little racy. She'd known that she was skipping ahead to the juicy bits of _Heat Wave _like a curious teenager; that's why she'd slipped into the stall at the precinct in the first place.

Beckett had always seen her writing as innocent. All right, so it was nothing that she would post around the precinct walls or even share with Lanie, but just because she kept it in her nightstand, that didn't mean it was as private as any of her real sexual encounters.

No, it was even more private, because she was the only one involved. And the fact that her pieces were incomplete and tangential was even more telling, as though she only wrote the parts that mattered, not for a story's sake but for her own.

Damn it.

The realization knocked her upside the head and left her tingly. Beckett hated to tingle without her own permission.

She ripped out the most offending page and tore it to pieces over the wastebasket.

She still felt the heat in her cheeks, so she rose and slid out the door into the dimness beyond, heading toward the bathroom.

From this safe distance, she scanned the living area for her houseguest. She could see only his feet propped up and his elbow hooked around the back of his head, but he was facing away from her, and she couldn't tell whether or not he was dozing.

She was now not only too tired to argue but also too tingly to face him, so she tiptoed into the bathroom to wash her face with cool water and insist for the umpteenth time since this case had started that she, Detective Kate Beckett, was not Nikki Heat.


	3. Dormant

**Part Three: Dormant**

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><p>He was wildly curious. That much was undeniable. He was guilty, and he didn't even bother to construct an alibi. That was what really separated the Katherine Beckett types from the Richard Castles.<p>

Of course, both of their careers were the careers of curious people. She was good at digging. He was just plain nosy.

"It's a novelist's habit," he'd explained, the first time she'd caught him sifting through files on her desk. He wasn't entirely beyond alibis; he just preferred excuses. "Poking through other people's mail. Checking their medicine cabinets." _Reading their secret fan-fiction._

And if it had been anyone other than Beckett's writing, that's all it might have been to him.

But knowing what he knew about his own writing process for _Heat Wave_(combine ingredients, making appropriate substitutions; add spice to taste; mix well; let simmer), Castle found himself dying to taste what his partner had cooked up.

He'd adjusted the original recipe, and even if she'd remained faithful to his substitutions, a new chef could find plenty of ways to give a personal twist to a dish's flavor and texture.

Yet his culinary metaphor fell short—or else risked a kinky and/or cannibalistic layer—because they were the soup almost as much as they were the chefs.

His interest in Beckett's writing was not limited to the fact that he knew the writer personally, or even that he wanted to see what her creative juices could do. It was also the fact that he suddenly couldn't help but link Heat and Rook back to them, especially when seeing them through her eyes.

Usually, this mechanism of his worked in one dominant direction: he was continually observing Beckett, storing up mannerisms and snippets of dialogue and elements of personal history in order to flesh out Nikki Heat.

Even having reread and revised his manuscript, he wasn't used to looking at Nikki Heat and fleshing out his image of Kate Beckett. He wasn't used to Kate being so—naked. Figuratively speaking.

No. Naked figure. No good. Too good. No.

Metaphorically speaking, then.

Naked because Beckett had penned this incarnation of Nikki, the one in his hands tonight. Castle found this twist even more intriguing than if Nikki had stepped off the page to write herself.

Nikki, like many of his characters, spoke to him all the time. Beckett was not only muse but mystery. That was, among other reasons, why she inspired him. If Beckett was the breath in, Nikki was the breath out.

As he read, he breathed in. Deep.

He knew why _he _wrote. Why did _she_? He kept reading and wondered if, in doing so, he was finding out.

_Is that what you really want to do to me, Beckett?_

He had to pause for a second to make sure he hadn't just said that aloud. Not that he'd never said it before, but he dared not utter those words in the House of Beckett, let alone in her presence. She was only in the next room. With a gun.

Hot.

He thought about their rhythm, their chemistry. If this _thing _that they had or might have had or might have someday was more than the thrill of the chase to him—and he supposed it was—then surely to her it had to be more than the thrill of putting him in his place.

Unless it was _all _about putting him in his place, in which case he still might not complain.

Maybe her desires were dormant, waiting to be aroused and fully realized.

Or maybe he was entirely wrong about her intentions—subconscious or otherwise—and he was just projecting. Realistic, because parts of him were feeling projectile.

He was too frustrated to deal with so many "maybes," so he simply settled back on the sofa to read, caught up in the intoxicating fluidity of her words, just as the loops of her handwriting were caught in rays of moonlight.

It occurred to Castle that he must have fallen asleep after all when he felt a hand graze his chest, and he opened his eyes to find a certain woman's softly lit silhouette towering above him.

"What is this?" Beckett snapped. The notebook was resting open against his body and she snatched it up in one hand, shutting it and holding it at shoulder-level, like she was busting him for drug possession. Given the biochemical effects that that book had on him, that might not have been too far from the truth.

Castle's mind was still foggy. "What?"

"How much did you see?"

"Not all of it," he said truthfully, beginning to ascertain that he was in trouble and not because he had fallen asleep while on duty.

She arched a brow. "Most of it?"

He turned out his lips in thought. "A decent amount."

"Decent," she intoned. "There's nothing decent about this, Castle."

He twisted her words to his liking. "Don't worry; I'm of legal age," he teased, indicating the book in her hand.

"I can't believe you invaded my privacy—_again_," she said, slamming the notebook down against her thigh before pacing away with it. "I don't even know how to tell you how that hurts."

He spoke over her, either not hearing the weight of what she was saying or reluctant to do so. "But one writer to another?—the _quality _is decent. I had no idea—"

She turned back again, cutting off his words with a look that could castrate a bull, but otherwise he couldn't tell if she'd heard him any more than he had heard her. "You read my journal like it was some kind of storybook!"

He didn't think his response through, but he would live to regret it. "Usually a 'journal' implies writing about stuff that actually happens to you." He didn't even know how he meant that. It certainly sounded less like an invitation than an insult.

Her entire face flushed in a way that he'd never seen before. It was an expression that easily might have wrangled together anger, humiliation, and frustration. Oh, yes. It was the Beckett Fury, magnified with her own wound.

"Although lots of writers do call their notebooks 'journals,'" he sputtered. It was a feeble save, and he knew it didn't suck the poison out of the snake-bite.

He was suddenly aware that he was still sitting, and he debated whether standing now would give them a more peace-inspiring level of eye contact or only put her further on the defensive. Because she had distanced herself from him by a few steps when she paced off, he took the chance and stood, hoping to reconnect.

"What can I say to make it up to you?"

She set down the notebook, briefly breaking their eye contact. "I don't know, Castle. What do you think you should say?"

Now wait. That wasn't fair. Not only was he supposed to do penance, but he was supposed to figure out what the appropriate penance was?

He was just beginning to craft his apology—because when Castle used words that mattered and had time to think about it, Castle crafted—but Beckett grew impatient, barely giving him a moment before she erupted, "What am I going to do with you?"

And suddenly something penetrated the atmosphere, filled it with a certain thickness that made their breathing shallow.

Suddenly both of them wanted to answer her question.

She looked at his lips; that was the last thing he remembered before they crashed together. He wasn't even sure which of them had initiated the kiss or moved forward first, but then again he was a little too busy at the time to ponder it.

His senses were overwhelmed: the warmth of one hand on his chest and one on his side; the heat that radiated between them even before their bodies touched; the sweet, heady scent of cherry and lust.

She clung to his shirt, finally letting her hands settle at his hips. He could barely process that she was pulling him against her, if only because he was immersed in the sensation of her tongue slipping past the seam of his lips in certain conquest. He stumbled in place as she plundered and pleasured him.

Withdrawing from him only to smile against him, she quivered when Castle trailed his hands along her body the way she'd written Rook, mauled her the way he'd written Nikki. Their mouths warred for a hold on a lower lip. His temporary win elicited a gratifying hum from her.

Having rendered her breathless, he released her mouth and skimmed across her jaw, one hand at her hip and one massaging her nape just below her messy bun. He kissed her neck, kissed it like both their lives depended on it; like he was sucking the poison out of the wound he'd inflicted, and if she lived, so would he. . . .

It occurred to Castle that he had fallen asleep when he awoke to the stillness of Beckett's living room, the notebook still resting open on his chest. And once the skewed feeling of déjà vu passed—because it felt like he'd done this before, except that he was alone and apparently undiscovered this time—he looked down at the book, peeled it off of himself in a hurry, and rose immediately to his feet.

And he realized that his subconscious must have been so uncomfortable with having betrayed Kate Beckett—so uncomfortable with her anger and her pain—that the problem-solving part of him had tried to fix everything by sending their dream selves into an aroused frenzy.

Needless to say, he was sorely disappointed.

He raked a hand through his already-tousled hair and sighed.


	4. Thrust

**Part Four: Thrust**

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><p>It wasn't just about the book anymore.<p>

It wasn't just about this book from which Beckett could mentally distance herself enough to function, if she pressed the right buttons (and refrained from pressing others). And it wasn't just about writing what she thought Castle had left out.

Maybe it was also about the quiet flattery of having inspired a fresh character. About someone beyond the department admiring her work. About a writer whose work she had admired taking interest in her life and beginning to unravel her carefully knotted layers, after all the years that _she_had tried to get into this then-stranger's headspace through the subtext of his stories.

It must have been all of those things. And with one slip of the pen, she could no longer pretend that it wasn't also about Rick Castle himself. It was as though she had been thrust into a different world, propelled out of her own Matrix and into reality.

Of course she'd known that Nikki and Rook were based off of her and Castle and simply embellished in all their sexy glory, but it had been easy to believe that Castle was the one with the unfulfilled fantasies.

And yet Castle could maintain his plot. Beckett shouldn't have tried to fool herself into thinking that she ever had one; upon further consideration, she was fairly certain that she contrived details of the fictional case to provide excuses (not to mention exotic locations and dramatic circumstances) for Rookie steam.

She had manipulated them into making out and more in a wine cellar and a movie theater projection room, in a high-end casino and a hotel elevator, mid-trek on a woodsy mountainside and while hopelessly snowed in at a deserted cabin. Despite all that, her so-called case had dragged on with surprisingly few complicated twists; unsolved and thus prolonging the adventure.

Castle had killed off a well-liked main character. Beckett couldn't even bring herself to finish off a fake case. Either it didn't occur to her that she could just start a new one, or she couldn't figure out how to tie up loose ends because she was expending all of her creative energy in aspects less central to the fictional investigation.

Was it true in life, too—that she wouldn't have the energy to commit to both her work and a relationship? Had Beckett's Nikki Heat failed in the case because Jameson Rook was too much of a distraction?

Was Beckett more protective of her professionalism, guarding herself from a similar fate? Avoiding the first touch and taste so she wouldn't be hooked?

She hadn't touched or tasted the wine, either, but as she studied her bathroom mirror, her head swam just the same with the realizations of this evening.

She never expected to unravel one of her own knots.

Having washed and re-washed her face with the cool water, she turned off the sink and reached for a white towel to dab her skin and catch her bearings.

When she opened the bathroom door and stepped out, she saw Castle on his feet by the couch, raking his hand through his hair, and before she could think better of it and tiptoe to her room, she was already speaking. "You stayed."

Castle turned in surprise, seeing her illuminated in the muted glow from her bedroom. She had changed into a long violet shirt and black leggings, her hair still pulled back in the messy bun. It was like captured sex hair, and it never failed to make him picture her unpinning it and throwing her head back.

This, however, didn't bode well in conjunction with the dream he'd just had, which had already rendered his body in a certain condition that he hoped she couldn't see at this distance.

"Yeah." He swallowed. "Did you want me—to go?"

"Oh. It's up to you." She met his eyes in the dim moonlight but glanced away like she had important business to attend to elsewhere. "Like I said, not going to argue."

"Because if you want—" He was suddenly very uncomfortable talking about what Beckett may or may not want. He caught her gaze again and soared for a moment. Then his stomach flipped, so he came in for a landing: "I didn't mean to upset you."

She quirked a brow, unsure whether to be grateful or suspicious. What was he doing? Just hours ago he'd told her, stone-faced, that he would not leave her alone in potential danger. If he was offering to leave at this hour, he was either sufficiently convinced that she was safe for the night, or he was up to something.

The corner of her mouth curled upward. "My couch not comfy enough for your delicate frame, Castle?"

He shocked her with a serious reply—something about it being just fine and that he'd already rested a while. Had she scared him so much that he couldn't even make the obligatory suggestion that he relocate to her nice, comfy bed?

Not that she would let him, but she missed the banter. Without it, something was out of whack.

He added, "Hope you haven't lost faith in me since I slept on the job."

She wanted to tell him, _'This isn't your job, Castle_,_'_ but she knew if she did, she would be saying implicitly, _'We both know the difference between business and pleasure.'_

So instead she went along with the notion that his stay was official business. "Of course not. What use would you be to the team tomorrow if you didn't sleep tonight?"

He noticed that she said "to the team" and not "to me." He wanted very badly to be of great use to her for the rest of the night. If that would mean depleting both of their energy reserves to the point of incapacity, then he figured that resisting as he did now was what one would call "taking one for the team."

His true reason for resistance, however, was his current inner conflict about the notebook at his feet. He knew she couldn't see it from where she was, but she would find it if his attentions were somehow diverted before he had a chance to return it to the shelf.

And no amount of necking or groping would curtail the reaction he knew she would have once she found out that he had snooped through what very well might be part of her most intimate inner life.

Then again, maybe it wasn't.

He had enjoyed her fiction about Rook and Nikki; enjoyed fantasizing that it was him and Beckett; enjoyed fantasizing that Beckett had made the same connection. How could she not?

But what if she hadn't?

He asked himself his default question (_Which would make a better story?_) but found himself utterly biased, which undermined his confidence all the more.

Maybe this wasn't a fictionalized rendition of all the things Beckett wanted to do to him. Maybe she hadn't just made a comment about him sleeping on her couch as a roundabout way of inviting him to her bedroom—and maybe he'd been right to deflect it rather than accepting it as one.

Maybe if she knew what he had found, they would laugh about it together, and he would tease her about being a fan and a closeted writer, but they would both know that what went on between Nikki and Rook in either of their writings had absolutely _nothing_ to do with Beckett and Castle.

He resurfaced from the deluge of Beckett-thoughts to find her staring at him, still bathed in bedroom light.

"I have to tell you something," he said quickly, realizing he must have left an awkward silence hanging in the air after her comment about not sleeping tonight, and not taking the time to realize that she had let it hang there, too.

Her breath caught, and she managed something throatier than a squeak. "What?"

So naked. Was it just his imagination, or were Beckett's feelings bare to him in the glow, even barer than they'd been on the pages she'd penned? The woman who stood before him now was not codenamed or disguised. She was not Nikki Heat, but in that moment she also wasn't the Kate Beckett she usually tried to be.

As badly as he'd just wanted to strip her down to her panties and stumble into the bedroom, now he wanted nothing more than to cover her up. She was too bare, too vulnerable.

Because he never would have recognized the feelings she wore on her sleeve, in her eyes, in the subtle catch of her breath, if he hadn't thought he'd seen them in that notebook first.

He couldn't tell her what he'd found earlier any more than he could tell her what he saw before him now. Neither was his to know.

Not yet.

And he promised to protect her.

"Something to ask you, actually," he said. "I was thinking. Can I carry a Taser?"

"What?" She tried not to deflate. Her more carefully constructed Kate Beckett was back.

He managed to build his case in spite of himself. "I mean, I can obviously handle one, and since I can't carry a gun. . . ." His voice trailed off, and he wondered if she would call his bluff.

She rolled her eyes and fled to her bedroom as soon as the words left her lips: "I wouldn't bet on it, Castle."

When she finally fell asleep, she dreamt of theorizing, and although the details of the case in question were fabricated in her subconscious, the rhythm of sharing the verbal tango with Castle was spot-on.

Because Kate Beckett tended to dream on the realistic end of the spectrum, and building theory with Castle was the closest she would let herself come to making love with him.

Their fully clothed dream figures leaned in toward one another with every phrase, until their covered hips made contact like magnets. Increasingly, their ideas came out in gasps and grunts. It was as though both of them were determined not to acknowledge the obvious: that verbally and physically grinding into one another like that was essentially the ins and outs of sex sans mess.

In.

He grunted: "Why go to the airport?" Out.

She gasped: "He must know she took the flight." In.

"—in which case—" Out.

"—that can only mean—" In.

Their voices rose in synchronization: "—they're _coming back!_"

She loved it when they finished together; smiling, sweaty, and breathless.

The mental transition to the two of them tangled together in bed sheets was a seamless one. Still breathless, still sweaty, still smiling.

Beckett woke with a start. A sex dream was not unthinkable in itself, but this was unique.

She'd had a Theory Sex dream.

With _Castle_.

How would she ever be able to lock eyes with him again? If he tried to theorize with her anytime soon, she'd need her poker face more than ever before.

This is precisely why it was always safer for her to think of him as the lazy, loyal dog snoozing at her door; or the nine-year-old on a sugar rush; or even the insufferable playboy who made a habit of autographing cleavage and bedding celebutantes.

Because if she thought of him as the man whose words alone made her stomach flutter, or the one whose fatherly devotion was not widely publicized and yet was deeply ingrained in his character, or the one who could thrust back and forth with her in fits of theory-building so beautiful they could have been choreographed—then she would come apart.

And after a year of avoiding her frustration, of denying it existed as surely as she denied herself release from it, she needed to come apart.

So she thought of him. She bit her bottom lip and stifled her sighs and swore she'd die on the spot if he heard what she was doing, what she was thinking.

And then she cleaned herself up and tried to sleep.

It wasn't the first time she had fantasized about him, but it was the first time she knew that it was about him, and that thought alone was exhausting.


	5. Dropped

A/N: If anyone wants to see how all this affects things later in this episode or others, I might play with this concept again, so let me know. (Any requests for timeframe? Because I'm seeing some possibilities in the second half of Season 2, or when Beckett would've started writing earlier in the season, but I'd love to know your interests.)

I'd say this is it for the hours between the wine and the pancakes, though. Hope you've enjoyed it! And thanks again for the feedback!

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><p><strong>Part Five: Dropped<strong>

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><p>After stealthily restoring the notebook to its place on the shelf, Castle collapsed on the sofa, closed his eyes, and tried to get back to sleep, because as far as he was concerned, that dream of his had <em>not <em>been resolved.

Just because he had backed off in an effort to protect her—and yes, admittedly, to protect himself and the secret that he'd discovered—it didn't mean that he didn't still want her. And considering where he was, and where she was, and where she was not, it looked like his dreams were the only place he was going to get any action.

Truth be told, he was still hot and bothered from that dominatrix case they'd just cracked and all the flirty innuendo that came with it, not to mention the past year's worth of tangoing with the detective. From the emergence of Jealous Beckett to his dream and the saucy reading material, this entire evening simply reignited him like someone blowing on smoldering wood.

The real Beckett had quickly returned to her room, but Dream Beckett's words still echoed in his mind as though she had actually said them: "What am I going to do with you?"

_Mm. I don't know, Beckett. What are you going to do with me? Can you . . . do that thing with your tongue again?_

But something was off, and much to his dissatisfaction, it wasn't their dream-clothes.

He couldn't seem to write the ending—was Dreamer's Block even a thing? He couldn't fantasize about her. He wrestled with that.

She was his muse, and if she went AWOL from his imagination now, would she still be there to inspire his writing? How interconnected were these two states of mind, exactly?

He fought the niggling urge to go back for the notebook. He wanted either a distraction or inspiration, but he stayed put, still the gentleman, and that's when the anxieties found him.

From memory, he began sorting out the parts that were clearly drawn from his interactions with Beckett, innocent enough as they were, and the parts both steamy and casual which he had attributed either to her inner desires or just plain invention. Now, though, he wondered which elements were purely from her imagination and which were based on her actual experience—experience that didn't involve him.

"Usually a 'journal' implies writing about stuff that actually happens to you," he'd said in the dream. But for all of his research, maybe he was the one fabricating the details of his fiction.

He wondered if her muse was a real lover, some old flame not yet extinguished in her heart. The portions of her writing that he had recognized—those that made him think his influence was not so carefully encoded—suddenly seemed to carry less weight than the numerous parts that had no obvious link to him. It made him feel ill.

What if the oddly specific, non-steamy details were not Beckett's artful meticulousness, but actually just her way of capturing the quirks and tastes of another man she knew?

What if the steamy details were not the fantasy of him, but rather the reality of someone else?

He pictured Beckett in another man's embrace, doing all _those things _to him. Doing those things in her bed, or in _his_, and not just in her mind.

He realized that he was gritting his teeth and worked to relax his jaw.

"No, she's right," he'd responded to Jordan Shaw's accusations and Beckett's prompt denial. "Aside from my second wife, this is the most sexless relationship I've ever been in."

Then why did it matter so much?

As if he needed to ask.

But even if some of her work had been based on previous experience, the look in her eye that night was unmistakable. So what if she still incorporated some other guy into her love scenes? Whoever got her motor running before was probably history now. Even if Castle himself wasn't entirely her Rook, he was fairly sure now that at least some part of her _wanted_ him to be.

Which raised another concern.

What if, after all the buildup, after all her writing, he didn't measure up—not just to the ex, but to the ideal?

Castle had always been so confident, but this fear became very real to him very quickly, and he wondered if Beckett ever had those concerns—that Nikki Heat was somehow a better version of herself, or that Castle and Beckett wouldn't be as good as their banter-foreplay and their vivid imaginations would have them believe.

He remembered the exchange once again: "It would've been great," and "You have no idea."

When it came down to it, the problem was that they really did have no idea. They had never even kissed.

Could he really act like it was a given that they'd be good together—what, because her breath tickled his ear when she leaned in close? Because she knew custom-made leather cuffs when she saw them? Because his pants tightened every time she bit her lip? Because she set a steamy scene in a film projection room?

The memories were more than welcome, but he shot down the defeatist train of thought like a railroad bandit. Of course some things were still a mystery, but all the more reason to invest in the investigation. And Castle was a hands-on sort of investigator.

"He, um, touches things," Beckett had explained, when Castle found Shaw's federal agent toys. And it was true. But if only she knew just how much he held back on a regular basis.

He decided then and there that, even if she was still going to play hard-to-get, even if this very personal mystery unfolded more gradually than he could bear, he _needed_ to hear Beckett agree to take on the case with him.

He didn't just want to protect her. He wanted to adventure with her. And he didn't just want to solve her; he wanted them both to solve the "us," whatever that might mean.

Somehow he managed to sleep again, and the first and last things on his mind were the words that he would offer to Beckett when she came back. By the time Castle got up and straightened the throw pillows, he knew that he would not speak with words alone.

Everything would need to be perfect. He would prepare a nice breakfast, with fresh coffee and the newspaper ready for her at the table. He'd serve her a plate of eggs and bacon, sit down with her, share a smile over the goodness of hot food and warm company (warm food and hot company?), and wait for just the right moment to talk to her.

He wouldn't tell her that he had found her private writings—that would be an invasive beginning to the conversation.

Besides, Castle didn't want to say or do anything that might discourage her from writing, whether it was hobby, release, or craft. Maybe someday she'd even join him in co-authorship, which in their case, he mused, could be a step up from mutual debriefing.

But he'd find a way to talk about their obvious attraction, their natural rhythm. He'd find a way for her to begin to express her true desires if it killed him, and he wasn't so sure that it wouldn't.

He was all nervous energy as he bustled about the kitchen. It didn't help that the eggs were expired and the bacon was looking a little like a Chia pet. Now what?

Pancakes would do. He didn't think that they carried the same weight as an edible way of saying, "I want to take care of you," as the protein-rich meal he'd planned, but they did require more care and time than cold cereal or a stop at a bagel shop on the way to work. Hopefully she would get the intended message.

She rose soon after him, having barely slept all night because she knew that their search for the third victim still awaited them—among other reasons.

While Castle spent the night in her living room, behaving himself like a gentleman, she imagined pulling him into bed and pondered the ridiculousness of longing for someone in the next room when she could have just woken him and invited him to play.

She was just sated enough and stubborn enough to stand by her decision, and she, too, managed to sleep uneventfully well for the last few hours. Upon waking, she hoped that he actually had gone home after their last encounter so that the circumstances of her pleasure were that much less ridiculous.

But by seven, she followed the scent of home cooking and the sound of scraping metal to the kitchen, where she was surprised to find him working diligently at the stove. "You're still here," she observed aloud, "and . . . you're making pancakes."

He explained about the bacon and eggs—just the unfortunate state the ingredients were in, and not what he wanted the meal to tell her. He was hanging onto the hope that the pancakes and coffee would communicate enough now to make it easier on him later to say what he had to say.

He'd had plenty of time to craft. He just needed to get the frenetic energy out of his system so that he could articulate properly.

"Yeah, well, I mostly order in," she admitted, briefly wondering if she should have gotten dressed before she came to investigate. She hoped the aromas from the kitchen overpowered her pheromones.

"I figured that from the Styrofoam Temple you've got going on in your refrigerator." Castle didn't miss a beat. "Coffee's brewed. Think your coffee filter's broken, though. I'll order you a new one later."

"Looks like you thought of everything."

He snapped his fingers. "Except the paper." Damn. He'd meant to have that at the table already, but he'd gotten distracted. He turned on his heel and headed like a man on a mission to the front door.

Beckett resisted the idea of a leisurely breakfast, already in work mode.

"Castle, we don't have time for the paper," she called after him, pouring the coffee. She had her priorities in check: work and caffeine both trumped news. "There's a body out there I've got to find."

And when the body dropped at Castle's feet, an abundantly clear sign that their leisurely breakfast was not going to happen, he somehow managed to make the obligatory quip instead of the gut-wrenching groan of exasperation that he truly felt.

"Looks like it found you."

What the writer could not know in the midst of his frustration was that this victim had essentially saved Castle and Beckett's relationship—or at least their chances for one.

Yes, Castle had prepared to be straightforward without putting either one of them on the chopping block. But certain looks from Beckett had a way of tying the words up in his mouth and making them come out in ways he didn't always intend. He easily might have revealed too much too soon, not just admitting his guilt but humiliating her while she was particularly vulnerable.

The pancakes and coffee had said, "I want to take care of you," and some part of her knew it. She knew with every morning's cup of coffee and so much more. But if she understood yet that the meal also meant, "I'm sorry," and why, she would not have had the strength to accept it. She may not have had the courage to work toward forgiveness the way that she did after he'd opened her mother's case file.

Because, in this case, her forgiveness of Castle would have been tangled up with forgiving herself, and she was still working on that.

When the body dropped, so did the impending conversation.

But newly aroused and confronted feelings remained intact, and that, in itself, was enough of an exposition for a story meant to be continued.

/


End file.
